A few days later she calls me in tears. She’s out on the street and would I come and get her at 116th and Broadway. There was trouble with her father, she has no money and doesn’t know what to do. She’s waiting on the corner and on the train she tells me how she got dressed with every intention of calling me and meeting me even though I had strong feelings about ties but her father said no, she wasn’t going out and she said yes, she was going out and he punched her on the mouth which, as I can see, is swelling. She ran from her father’s house and there’s no going back. Mary O’Brien says she’s in luck. One of the boarders is gone back to Ireland to marry the girl down the road and his room is available.
In a way I’m glad her father punched her because she came to me instead of Bob and that surely means she prefers me. Of course Bob is unhappy and in a few days there he is at the door calling me a sneaky little bogtrotter and telling me he’s going to break my head but I move my head to one side and his fist crashes into the wall and he has to go to the hospital for a cast. On the way out he threatens he’ll see me again and I’d better make my peace with my Maker though when I run into him a few days later at NYU he offers his good hand in friendship and I never see him again. He may be calling Mike Small behind my back but it’s too late and she shouldn’t even be talking to him since she already allowed me into her room and into her bed forgetting how she was reserving the body for the wedding night and the honeymoon. The night of our first excitement she tells me I’ve taken her virginity and if I should feel guilty or sad I can’t especially when I know I’m the first, the one that stays forever in any girl’s memory, as they used to say in the army.
We can’t stay at Mary O’Brien’s because we can’t resist the temptation to be in the same bed and there are knowing looks. Paddy Arthur stops talking to me altogether and I’m not sure if he’s being pious or patriotic, angry that I’m with someone neither Catholic nor Irish.
The Captain sends word he’s ready to give Mike a certain amount of money every month and that means she can rent a small apartment in Brooklyn. I’d like to live with her but the Captain and the grandmother would think that disgraceful, so I rent my own cold-water flat at 46 Downing Street in Greenwich Village. They call it a cold-water flat and I don’t know why. It has hot water but no heat except for a large kerosene heater which turns so red I’m afraid it might blow up. The only thing I can do to keep warm is to buy an electric blanket at Macy’s and plug it into a long cord that lets me wander around. There’s a bathtub in the kitchen, and a lavatory in the hallway I must share with an old Italian couple across the hall. The old Italian man knocks on my door to tell me I’m to put my own toilet paper on the holder in the lavatory and I’m to keep my hands off his. He and his wife mark their toilet paper and they’ll know if I try to use it so watch out. His English is poor and when he starts to tell me of the troubles he had with the previous tenants in my flat he becomes so frustrated he shakes his fist in my face and warns me I could be in big trouble if I touch his toilet paper, big trouble, yet gives me a roll to start me off, to make sure I don’t touch his. He says his wife is a nice woman and giving me the roll is her idea, that she’s a sick woman who wants a quiet life and no trouble. Capice?
Mike finds a small apartment on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. She has her own bathroom and no one torments her over toilet paper. She says my apartment is a disgrace and she doesn’t know how I can live like that, no heat, no place to cook, Italians yelling over toilet paper. She feels sorry for me and lets me stay over. She makes delicious dinners even though she didn’t even know how to make coffee when her father punched her out of the house.
When classes end she goes back to Rhode Island to have her dentist examine the abscess caused by her father’s fist. I’m taking summer session courses at NYU, reading, studying, writing term papers. I’m working at the bank, the midnight to eight shift, and operating the forklift at the Baker and Williams Warehouse two days a week, dreaming of Mike Small nice and cozy with her grandmother in Rhode Island.
She calls to tell me her grandmother isn’t that angry with me anymore over what I said about her easy life. Grandma even said something nice about me.
What was that?
She said you have a nice head of black curly hair and she feels so sorry about the thing with my father she doesn’t mind if you come here for a day or two.
After what happened to me in the bank I could go to Rhode Island for a week. A man sat next to me in a coffee shop on Broad Street near where I worked, told me he had heard me talk the night before and figured I was Irish, right?
I am.
Yeah, well, I’m Irish, too, Irish as Paddy’s pig, father from Carlow, mom from Sligo. I hope you don’t mind but I got your name from someone and found you’re a member of the Teamsters and the ILA.
My ILA card expired.
That’s okay. I’m an organizer and we’re trying to break into these fucking banks, excuse the language. Are you on for that?
Oh, sure.
I mean you’re the only one we could get on your shift with any kind of union history and what we’d like you to do is just drop little hints. You know and they know the banks pay shit wages. So, just a little hint here and there, not too many, not too soon, and I’ll see you in a few weeks. Here, I’ll take care of the bill.
Next night is Thursday, pay night, and when we receive our checks the supervisor says, You’ve got the rest of the night off, McCourt.
He makes sure everyone on the shift hears him. You’re off tonight, McCourt, and all the other nights and you can tell that to your union friends. This is a bank and we don’t need any goddam unions.
They say nothing, the typists, the clerks. They nod. Andy Peters would say something but he’s still on the four to twelve shift.
I take my check and as I wait for the elevator an executive comes out of his office. McCourt, right?
I nod.
So, you’re finishing college, right?
I am.
Ever think of joining us here? You could come aboard and we’d have you up to a nice five-figure salary in three years. I mean you’re one of our own, right? Irish?
I am.
Me, too. Father from Wicklow, mom from Dublin, and when you work at a bank like this doors open, you know, AOH, Knights of Columbus, all that there. We take care of our own. If we don’t, who will?
I was just fired.
Fired? What the hell you talking about? Fired for what?
For letting a union organizer talk to me in a coffee shop.
You did that? Let a union organizer talk to you?
I did.
That was a stupid damn thing to do. Look, pal, we’re outa the coal mines, we’re outa the kitchens and the ditches. We don’t need unions. Will the Irish ever get sense? Asking you a question. Talkin’ a yeh.
I say nothing here and on the elevator going down. I say nothing because I’ve been fired from this bank and there’s nothing to say anyway. I don’t want to talk about the Irish getting sense and I don’t know why everyone I meet has to tell me where his father and mother came from in Ireland.
The man wants to argue with me but I won’t give him the satisfaction. It’s better to walk away and leave him to the height he grew, as my mother used to say. He calls after me to tell me I’m an asshole, that I’ll wind up digging ditches, delivering beer barrels, pouring whiskey for boozy micks in a Blarney Stone bar. He says, Jesus, is there anything wrong with looking after your own kind? and the strange thing is there’s something in his voice that’s sad as if I were a son that disappointed him.
Mike Small meets my train in Providence, Rhode Island, and takes me by bus to Tiverton. On the way we stop at a liquor store for a bottle of Pilgrim’s rum, Grandma’s favorite. Zoe, the grandmother, says hi but doesn’t offer hand or cheek. It’s dinnertime and there’s corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes because that’s what the Irish like to eat, according to Zoe. She says I must be tired from the trip and surely I’d like a drink. Mike looks at me and smiles and we know it’s Zoe who wants a drink, rum and Coke.
How about you, Grandma? Would you like a drink?
Well, I dunno, but all right. Are you making the drinks, Alberta?
Yes.
Well, go easy with the Coke. It kills my stomach.
We sit in a living room dark from layers of blinds, curtains, drapes. There are no books, magazines, newspapers and the only pictures are of the Captain in his army lieutenant’s uniform and one of Mike, a blonde angel of a child.
We sip our drinks and there’s a silence because Mike is in the hallway answering the phone and Zoe and I have nothing to say to each other. I wish I could say, This is a nice house, but I can’t because I don’t like the darkness of this room when the sun is beaming outside. Then Zoe calls out, Alberta, you gonna stay on that goddam phone all night? You have a guest. She says to me, That’s Charlie Moran she’s talking to. They was great friends all through school but goddam he likes to talk.
Charlie Moran, is it? Mike leaves me here in this gloomy room with Grandma while she chatters away with her old boyfriend. All these weeks in Rhode Island she’s been having a grand time of it with Charlie while I’m slaving away in banks and warehouses.
Zoe says, Make yourself another drink, Frank. That means she wants one, too, and when she tells me go easy on the Coke, it kills her stomach, I double her rum dosage hoping it will knock her out so that I can have my way with her granddaughter.
But no, the drink makes her livelier and after a few swallows she says, Let’s eat, goddammit. Irishmen like to eat, and while we’re eating, she says, Do you like that, Frank?
I do.
Well, then, eat it. You know what I always say. A meal ain’t a meal without a potato and I’m not even Irish. No, goddammit, not a drop of Irish though there’s a bit of Scotch. MacDonald was my mother’s name. That’s Scotch, isn’t it?
’Tis.
Not Irish?
No.
After dinner we watch television and she falls asleep in her armchair after telling me that Louis Armstrong there on the screen is ugly as sin and can’t sing worth a damn. Mike shakes her and tells her go to bed.
Don’t tell me go to bed, goddammit. You might be a college student but I’m still your grandmother, isn’t that right, Bob?
I’m not Bob.
You’re not? Well, who are you?
I’m Frank.
Oh, the Irishman. Well, Bob’s a nice fellow. He’s gonna be an officer. What are you gonna be?
A teacher.
A teacher? Oh, well, you won’t be drivin’ no Cadillac, and she pulls herself up the stairs to bed.
Now, surely, with Zoe snoring away in her room Mike will visit my bed but, no, she’s too nervous. What if Zoe woke suddenly and discovered us? I’d be out on the road hailing the bus to Providence. It’s a torment when Mike comes to kiss good night and even in the dark I know she’s in her pink baby doll pajamas. She won’t stay, oh, no, Grandma might hear and I tell her I wouldn’t care if God Himself were in the next room. No, no, she says, and leaves, and I wonder what kind of world is this where people will walk away from a chance of a wild fling in the bed.
At dawn Zoe runs the vacuum cleaner upstairs and downstairs and complains, This goddam house looks like Hogan’s Alley. The house is spotless because she has nothing else to do but clean it and she barks about Hogan’s Alley to put me in my place because she knows I know it was a dangerous Irish slum in New York. She complains the vacuum cleaner doesn’t pick up the way it used to though it’s easy to see there’s nothing to pick up. She complains that Alberta sleeps too late and is she supposed to make three separate breakfasts, her own, mine, Alberta’s?
Her neighbor, Abbie, drops in and they drink coffee and complain about kids, dirt, television, that goddam ugly Louis Armstrong who can’t sing, dirt, the price of food and clothes, kids, the goddam Portuguese taking over everything in Fall River and surrounding towns, bad enough when the Irish ran everything, at least they could speak English long as they were sober. They complain about hairdressers who charge a fortune and can’t tell a decent hairdo from a donkey’s ass.
Oh, Zoe, says Abbie, your language.
Well, I mean it, goddammit.
If my mother were here she’d be puzzled. She’d wonder why these women complain. Lord above, she’d say, they have everything. They’re warm and clean and well fed and they complain about everything. My mother and the women in the slums of Limerick had nothing and rarely complained. They said it was the will of God.
Zoe has everything but complains with the music of the vacuum cleaner and that may be her way of prayer, goddammit.
In Tiverton Mike is Alberta. Zoe complains she doesn’t know why a girl would want to use a goddam name like Mike when she has her own name, Agnes Alberta.
We walk around Tiverton and I imagine again what it would be like to be a teacher here, married to Alberta. We’d have a sparkling kitchen where every morning I’d have my coffee and an egg and read the Providence Journal. We’d have a big bathroom with plenty of hot water and thick towels with powerful naps and I might loll there in the tub and gaze on the Narragansett River through little curtains billowing gently in the morning sun. We’d have a car for trips to Horseneck Beach and Block Island, and we’d visit Alberta’s mother’s relations in Nantucket. As the years passed my hair would recede, my belly protrude. Friday nights we’d attend local high school basketball games and I’d meet someone who might sponsor me for the country club. If they admitted me I’d have to take up golf and that would surely be the end of me, the first step toward the grave.
A visit to Tiverton is enough to drive me back to New York.